


pull this thread as i walk away

by thegatorgood



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Gen, Ronbledore, Time travel - No fix it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegatorgood/pseuds/thegatorgood
Summary: "This is bad," Ron said, looking down at the unconscious form of Albus Dumbledore.  "This is very bad."
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald (mentioned), Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley (mentioned)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 117





	pull this thread as i walk away

**Author's Note:**

> This was due last April. Forgive me, I suck.

**1944**

Ron decided to lie flat on his back and not open his eyes. It had been a long two days and he wasn't sure how he was going to get through the rest of the week without snapping and transfiguring his daughter's in-laws into ferrets.

"Your stupid house tried to eat me again, Malfoy," he said. "If this keeps up, I'm going to ask Hermione to get you on zoning regulations, I know you're scared of _her_."

"Oh, bugger," said a voice that, while familiar, was not Malfoy's, or Hermione's, or anyone else's in the whole damned house.

Ron cracked an eye open. There were candles and swirling blue and purple smoke and small jewels tinkling in the air. A fluffy feather drifted down to his face and he sneezed it away. There was a rather unkempt, gray-robed figure beginning to kneel down over him. It looked about as familiar as the voice sounded--he knew it, but he couldn't put a name to it, and he didn't have any pleasant associations with it.

Ron shut his eyes again. He'd been best mates with Harry Potter for over fifty years, and while it didn't involve as much weirdness as it used to, every so often some long lost dark wizard heiress popped out of the woodwork and there was time travel and alternate universes and great flocks of birds attacking London and the time Lily's cat got stuck up a cursed tree and came down with opposable thumbs, which had only been the start of their problems. "Do I want to know?"

"I wouldn't say so," said the voice. "Don't know how you're going to get out of knowing it, though."

Ron heaved himself into a sitting position. His entire back hurt. His arse especially--he must have landed on it when he arrived here, wherever _here_ was. "I warn you, if you're trying to kidnap me to get the Ministry of Magic to release your blood purist friends from Azkaban or publish your manifesto or get the Smooth Jazz Hour of Power back on the Wizarding Wireless, you'd better return me. Hermione doesn't negotiate with terrorists." Mostly because she was one. It was endearing when Ron wasn't on the end of it, and it had made house hunting, child rearing, and getting reservations at fancy restaurants for Mum's birthday at the last minute much, much easier.

"Is that so?" The man pulled out a pipe and stuffed something into it, then spelled it on fire. "I was going to ask you where you think you are, but sounds like I'd better go with _when_ you think you are." He sighed and offered his free hand to help Ron to his feet. His pipe smoke was noxious. "Probably shouldn't have punched him, but I couldn't help myself."

"I know what that's like," said Ron, peering through the smoke-filled room for the punched person. "I met Draco Malfoy fifty years ago, and it's all I can do not to--"

Lying on the floor halfway across an elaborate chalk circle was an auburn-haired and -bearded man in purple robes. His half-moon-shaped glasses were askew on his face and his nose had been broken from being punched before. Ron felt his stomach sink to the bottom of his feet, because he _did_ recognize Albus Dumbledore, his old dead headmaster and not the kind of person you felt an uncontrollable urge to punch for being a berk.

"Er," said Ron.

"Oh, so you've heard of _him_." The man puffed on his pipe again. "My famous older brother."

And now he understood why the man would want to punch Albus Dumbledore in the face. "You're Aberforth," he said, surprised. And now he remembered that meeting quite vividly. He remembered the whole day, the whole final battle, vividly. Usually he wished he didn't. "We've met," he said, "in the Hog's Head. So, apart from being your older brother, what was he doing that made you punch him?"

Aberforth sighed. "I came in here and he was setting up some sort of spell to help him defeat Grindelwald."

That, Ron thought, was bad. It was very bad. It was so spectacularly bad, on a number of levels. It meant that Dumbledore hadn't defeated Grindelwald yet, for one thing, and was now sprawled out unconscious on the floor, and Ron didn't know how long they had left before the duel was supposed to take place. And if the spell was something Dumbledore needed to defeat Grindelwald, and if he didn't complete it, things would be fucked even if he did wake up. And-- "Oh, that's what all the candles and floaty scarves are for, I thought they were just his usual decoration."

"You're not far wrong," said Aberforth, with a grim sort of satisfaction. "Anyway, I told him he didn't need a spell to bring him help, what he needed was to get his arse to Belgium to fight a dark lord, and a good kick in the pants while we were at it, and then he said something about soon it'd be someone else's problem, and I punched him."

Ron wished he could sit back down again. He had enough faith in Dumbledore to realize that the spell had probably mostly done what it was supposed to do. It'd been meant to grab someone who could defeat a Dark Lord, and it had traveled through time and space to do so, only not quite enough space. Harry and Ginny and their kids and grandkids had been at Malfoy's for the party too, and Harry was definitely a Dark Lord defeater. Hermione could've managed it too, and so could have Rose, and maybe Scorpius, at a pinch. But Aberforth had punched Albus, and it had all gone fuck up and grabbed Ron instead.

"This is bad," he said, looking down at the unconscious form of Albus Dumbledore. "This is very bad."

-

They snuck Dumbledore down to Hogsmeade with a lot of levitation and disillusionment charms and even more swearing. According to Aberforth, it'd be a terrible idea to leave his brother at the school like this, because if Grindelwald got word of it, he'd probably storm into Britain, and Grindelwald would hear, he had spies everywhere.

Ron took his word for it. He hadn't studied history, didn't really need to with Hermione around all the time. 

"So I guess we just wait for him to wake up," said Ron. He really didn't have any better ideas.

Aberforth shrugged. "You're from the future, and you recognized him. Sounds like he gets over it and does whatever important things you recognize him for."

"Yeah, but," said Ron, "what if he, like, needs to do those important things but because he's--" Ron gestured to Dumbledore's prone and snoring form, "--he doesn't?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," said Aberforth, which was even less reassuring than the bitterness in his voice when he'd talked about Dumbledore doing important things. "In the meantime, I've got a pub to run."

Ron tactfully didn't say that he'd been in the Hog's Head before and it didn't look like that much work went into it. The grime was familiar, and so were the cobwebs, and he was pretty sure that the same fruitcake had been there when he and Neville had popped in for a drink two weeks ago. Or maybe it was a hundred years from now. Wouldn't have surprised Ron.

Aberforth went to pour the drinks, which left Ron to do nothing. There were a couple of dedicated drunkards at the inn, and Ron lurked in the kitchen while Aberforth topped off his customers' glasses. Ron was slowly getting drunk in the Hog's Head grubby kitchen when Aberforth finally asked if he could cook.

"Uh," said Ron.

Aberforth threw an apron at him, which Ron thought might be dirtier than anything he might actually spill on his robes. "I have paying customers," he said, with a pointed look at the mug of ale in Ron's hand.

"You're half the reason I've been dragged into here from the future," Ron protested, but he began rummaging around for pots and ingredients anyway. "Do you charge all your time-traveling customers?"

Aberforth stopped and looked at him. "Type of place I run, I don't ask when they're from."

Ron snorted. It was only fair, he supposed, and put himself to work making a shepherd's pie. It wasn't exactly up to his mum's standards but his mum's onions generally had been dug up within the last year, certainly within the last decade, and her carrots were an actual orange instead of a withered yellow. Ron used the spices by smell, only realizing what a bloody stupid idea that had been when he set the dishes to washing in the sink with a flick of his wand. The contents of those dusty glass jars could have been _anything_ , and he'd been sticking them up his nose.

(He'd never expected to learn any of those household-y spells, but Hermione was very into equitable distribution of housework, and also if Ron had never learned how to cook they'd have gone hungry many nights when Hermione had to stay at the office and he'd yet to master the art of Muggle take-aways. Besides, he'd folded the second he'd found himself about to explain to a four-year-old Rose that it was Mums who made suppers more involved than pizzas or beans on toast.)

Aberforth came back in with an approving sniff. Ron hadn't actually thought he'd be thrown out onto the streets of Hogsmeade if he didn't cook, but he was still a bit relieved, and, honestly, the smell of food cooking always made him feel better, even if he'd been the one who cooked it and wasn't necessarily going to be the one who was eating it. Also, the ale was good--and free. That helped. 

-

When Ron woke up the next morning, Dumbledore was still unconscious. Ron could tell because Aberforth, to save space and keep an eye on his brother, had put them in the same room _and_ the same bed, and Ron woke up with his nose scant inches from Dumbledore, yelped, then nearly hit him, then nearly fell off the bed, and then sat up, heart racing, head trying to keep up. And throughout it all, Dumbledore dozed on.

"He didn't wake up in the night, either." Aberforth was standing in the door, eating what looked like muesli. Ron hated muesli.

"Blimey," he said. "Was that really necessary?"

Aberforth shrugged and kept crunching his muesli. "I've asked a sort of friend of mine to stop by and look at him if there isn't any progress soon. She's a Healer at St. Mungo's."

"Do you trust her?" asked Ron, yawning in the middle of the question and not bothering to hide it. 

"Don't need to trust her when I know what I know about her," Aberforth muttered darkly, and sloped off.

Ron looked down at Dumbledore. "Pleasant bloke, your brother," he said, and he couldn't be sure, but it looked like Dumbledore was smiling in his sleep. Coma. Whatever.

-

Ron cooked pancakes for Aberforth's ingrate customers, puttered around the pub, fed the goats. He didn't look at a newspaper, didn't really talk to anyone. He didn't want to think too much about the part where he was a hundred years back in time and, oh, yeah, Grindelwald might not get defeated this time around, and household stuff had always been a good way to distract himself, not that he'd ever admit it to Hermione or his mum. It managed to get him through a few days of Dumbledore not waking up and Aberforth getting increasingly bad-tempered, which Ron supposed was his way of showing concern for his brother, or maybe he was also getting worried about who would defeat Grindelwald if Albus Dumbledore was out cold for the duration. 

Or maybe he was actually concerned about his brother. Stranger things had happened.

Ron was putting the finishing touches on a strawberry trifle when a middle-aged witch with absurd amounts of hair and dark shadows under her eyes came stomping into the Hog's Head kitchen and cornered him. "Was it you who did the stasis spell?"

Ron liked her already. "Yeah," he said. "Aberforth's got us sharing a bed and I really don't need to be cleaning that up too."

"You did a good job." She hopped onto one of the stools and took a pipe from her sleeves. Ron moved the trifle out of the way, he didn't need it tasting like ashes, and wondered why the bloody hell everyone was smoking in the forties. He'd thought it was just a Muggle thing. "Where'd you learn it?"

A bunch of political lunatics were always after him or Hermione or their kids or all of the above, so Ron had pretty much learned to stick anyone caught by their protective spells in stasis and roll them to the kerb for pickup by the Ministry. But he was keeping the time travel thing a secret: he didn't need to add being arrested for it to his already considerable troubles. "Oh, here and there."

"You may need to refresh it a few times," she said, and blew out a cloud of foul-smelling greenish smoke. 

"A few times?" Ron gawped. "Those things are good for a week at least."

"And whatever he's in, he's not going to be waking from it for at least a month."

Ron rubbed his head. Didn't make it hurt any less. "But--"

"Term ends this week," said Aberforth, who'd snuck in among the clouds of the Healer's smoke. "No one's going to miss him during the summer holidays."

Ron didn't say: yes, and what if he doesn't wake up during the holidays either? What if he kept on snoozing and then it was time for his duel with Grindelwald and the timeline was fucked and who knew what terrible totalitarian state Ron'd return to once he figured out how to travel back forward through time? What if he popped out of existence once he got to his timeline? What if there was no timeline left because the Muggles decided to nuclearize Grindelwald rather than surrender? Ron didn't say any of that because Ron didn't want to think any of that. Albus Dumbledore would wake up in time for the new school year, he had to. And then he would send Ron back to the future. Although maybe he could send him back to the future a few weeks further into the future, when their annual visit to Malfoy Manor was over.

Ron decided he'd hang on to that hope. And he'd tell Aberforth to get him his own bloody bed.

-

In the middle of August, just as Ron was putting the finishing touches on a fruit tart, Aberforth came back into the kitchen and said, "How were your marks in Transfiguration? D'you think you could teach it?"

Ron had known something like this moment was coming, since it'd been nearly two months with no change to Albus Dumbledore (who'd got his own bloody room at the beginning of July), but he hadn't expected this to be Aberforth's primary concern. "Er."

"It's all right, I've got a pot of Polyjuice potion in the goat shed," said Aberforth, like that made it better. It did not! It did not make it better! It just made him wonder what Aberforth was brewing Polyjuice in the goat shed for. "All you need to do is swish around at the head of the class and subtly insult people, no one will ever know the difference."

"What?" Ron realized, belatedly, that he'd dropped a bunch of strawberries on the counter. "This is Albus Dumbledore! He was the most powerful wizard of the twentieth century! He discovered--all sorts of things. He has a chocolate frog card! How am I supposed to pass myself off for him?"

Aberforth didn't seem impressed. Not even by the chocolate frog card. "I just bloody told you."

"That's teaching! That's not fighting dark lords! That's not dueling!"

"Oh," said Aberforth, far too blithely, "you needn't worry about that."

-

**1945**

Ron was getting tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of remembering to swig Polyjuice Potion at least once an hour during the duel. Tired of these heavy robes with defensive spells threaded into the embroidery. Tired of Gellert Grindelwald screaming at him that he was a wretched ingrate with no ambition or fashion sense.

When Harry had dueled Voldemort it had been over in fifteen minutes, half an hour, tops. This felt like an eternity and not only in comparison. Ron's shoulder ached. His knees and wrists and elbows and ankles ached because it was fucking raining and they were dueling in the rain and the mud, and, sure, he had a bubblehead charm to keep the rain out of his eyes, and his boots were waterproof, but it was the heaviness of the air and the iciness of the rain and, if he was being honest, being _old_ that made it hurt. Ron supposed that when the real Dumbledore had dueled Grindelwald the first time around it hadn't taken nearly this long. Ron had been doing some intense training once it became blindingly obvious Albus Dumbledore wasn't going to wake up, but he still didn't have Dumbledore's power or his talent, and he really wished he had refused to follow the timeline he knew and holed up in a pub somewhere. He'd made a cheese soufflé at the Hog's Head last weekend. He could do with some cheese now and a pint of brown ale. Instead, he had the rain pissing down on his robes and into his boots and a bloke with bad hair and a dodgy eye screaming curses at him.

Grindelwald leveled his wand at Ron, and Ron dodged, and slipped, and fell into the mud. His tailbone hit a stone and his right leg went numb and he found himself clutching at nothing, or rather a lot of filthy mud, with his left hand.

This was it, he thought, as Grindelwald bore down on him. He was going to die, and he was never going to see any of them again. His children, his parents. His friends. Hermione.

"Expelliarmus," he shouted, and maybe it was a trick of the light, of which there wasn't because of the bloody storm, but Ron thought Grindelwald might have hesitated in throwing a curse at him, and it saved his life. The bastard was probably trying to choose the most painful way he could think of to kill Albus Dumbledore. Ron would have laughed at the expression on Grindelwald's face as the wand flew out of his hand and into Ron's, if he hadn't been so bloody tired.

And then he knocked him out with a simple sleeping spell, because maybe that was all he had the energy left for, and he might have gotten pretty good at them from decades of babysitting his nephews and nieces. He'd never used one on his own kids, though. Ron had standards, he reflected, staring at that ridiculous hair, a shocking splash of white in the mud.

And that was how the war was won.

-

"I never want to do that again," Ron said, sinking into the grimy tub in his room at the Hog's Head. He'd let the Polyjuice Potion wear off before sneaking out of Hogwarts. It was a great disguise. Ron felt like a certified genius for thinking of it. A bruised, battered, mud-encrusted genius who might fall asleep in this tub. It was just hot water and a cheap bar of soap that smelled faintly of goats, but Ron might have married this bath, if that wouldn't have been committing bigamy and also a sure way to get Hermione to travel back through time and lob some birds at him and this lovely, lovely bath.

"He's locked up, isn't he?"

"Yeah," said Ron, sinking deeper with a groan.

"So what've you got to worry about?"

Ron grunted. "There's always another dark lord," he said, and tried not to let the thought ruin his bath. Because he'd seen him, at Hogwarts, all last year. Tom bloody Riddle. He would nearly kill Ginny, he would try to kill Harry twice. His followers would manage to kill more people: two of Ron's uncles, a third of the Auror force, countless Muggles. Sirius. Lupin. Tonks. Fred.

He wasn't supposed to do anything that would screw up this timeline, but that wasn't what had stopped Ron from murdering the little bastard when he'd had the chance.

What had stopped him was that the little bastard reminded Ron of Fabian. Not that the two looked anything alike--Fabian had that weird Malfoy clone thing going on--but Fabian was also seventeen, and, as Rose's son and Hermione's grandson, was very smart and powerful and he knew it. Tom Riddle was much more awful than your bog standard annoying teenager, but that didn't mean Ron didn't see--and miss--his grandson every time Riddle turned in another irritatingly perfect essay.

Besides, Ron's main plans for the future had included trying to shake Albus Dumbledore back into waking up (which had failed) and then suiting up in the ugliest thing in Dumbledore's wardrobe and going off to die at Gellert Grindelwald's creepy corpse-white hands, because who was Ronald Bilius Weasley to defeat a dark lord?

"You know," he told Aberforth, scraping the soap between his toes, "he wasn't as scary as I though he'd be. Ugly, yeah, but he just--" Ron shrugged. "--he must have had a cold or something, his timing was off."

Aberforth snorted. "You know he and my brother were friends, right?" 

Ron did, vaguely, because Harry had spent a lot of time yelling about it back in the day, but it had been nearly fifty years ago (or fifty years from now) and Harry had yelled about a lot of things and not all of them had stuck in his mind. "Now that you mention it, yeah."

"He was expecting my brother to be there and emotional. Easier to manipulate, easier to defeat." Aberforth snorted again, with a bit of a sour cackle at the end. "Of course, you showed up, and you don't know him from a roadside goblin, and it must have really burned him that Albus Dumbledore had finally come to fight and was looking at him like he meant nothing. Like none of it had ever happened. You had him pissed off and panicked and making every mistake a man can make." He really, really did not have a nice smile.

"Yeah," said Ron, "but then maybe he'd want revenge."

"If he couldn't break out of there when my brother put him in, he won't just because it was you." Aberforth shrugged. "Anyway, when you're done, come on down to the kitchen. I bought you some of that disgusting Muggle food you like."

Ron, who'd been expecting to be told that the curry wasn't going to cook itself, knew he was gawping. Aberforth snorted again and left.

-

**1946**

"Teaching is horrible," he told Aberforth. "This is my second year of it and the first one I was too worried about being killed by a dark lord to fully notice how awful it is. My mum always said people were better behaved back in the day, but that's a lie. They're little toerags, all of them."

"I'm sure you were a model student."

"And I have a summer job. Slughorn keeps banging on about his holiday in Ibiza, while I--" Ron checked the lamb in the oven. "--not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'd take working here over there any day." Aberforth paid him in room and board and drink. Ron hadn't tried to access Dumbledore's Gringotts account yet, but he was going to have to soon. The socks he was taking from Dumbledore's cupboard were getting thin. He'd been sent new cloaks, new dragonskin boots, and even new underpants, from admirers who wanted to thank him for defeating Grindelwald and saving Europe and all from that wonky iron fist, but no one thought of sending socks. He'd have to buy some. Or learn how to knit, but that was the one household-y spell he'd always been rubbish at. "Any changes?"

"I don't know," said Aberforth after a while. He handed Ron a pint of ale. It was already warm out and the oven made things warmer. "I'm doing the stasis charms like you taught me, and I've had Cordie back to check, and there doesn't seem to be a change, but...."

"But," Ron prodded.

"There'll be times when it looks like he's having a bad dream. You know."

Ron did. Hermione frequently got that look on her face the evening before she'd tell him all about the nightmare in which she'd filled out Form 2308-A instead of 2308-B and also something about someone named Boris Johnson, who had made her job miserable for several years. "And he's not supposed to be dreaming."

"That's what Cordie says about stasis spells, but who knows what damage his own spell did to him first?"

"He will," said Ron. "When he wakes up. He'll know."

Aberforth grunted. "Lot of faith you have in him."

Which was what he'd say decades from now, too. "You have to have faith in someone."

-

That summer, Ron grabbed a bunch of books on magical healing out of the Hogwarts library and tried to make sense of them in his spare time. He had enough of it. There weren't a lot of customers at the Hog's Head who came there for the food, and Aberforth didn't have the highest housekeeping standards. Some of the customers would be spooked if things got too clean. They came for the ambience. The ambience of nobody calling the Aurors if illegal deals were going down. The ambience of hallucinatory substances being mixed into what few cocktails Aberforth served, the ones that weren't on the official menu. The ambience of nobody noticing Ron there every summer, wearing what looked like Albus Dumbledore's clothes, and then gone for the rest of the year. It suited Ron just fine. He could keep his own room and the kitchen as clean as he liked, and with the Aberforth's handful of customers, no one was going to notice if he floated one of the tables up to his already cramped room to work on. He read and scribbled notes as he took his tea in the morning, and he missed Hermione dreadfully. This was the kind of problem she'd attack full-on, without mercy. Mostly it just frustrated him when he was two books in and finding out that there were probably billions of kinds of spell damage and who knew which kind Dumbledore had, since they didn't even know what kind of spell he'd been using. 

Late July, Ron downed some Polyjuice Potion, snuck back up to Hogwarts, and grabbed the Pensieve from Dumbledore's office. He pulled out his memory of landing here so he could study the spell in detail. He got Aberforth to give him his memory of it too. He made notes on everything he noticed, but he had no idea what any of the arrangements meant. He wasn't smart like Hermione and he didn't spend all day reading esoteric books about runes and rituals like Malfoy because he had responsibilities and friends and Malfoy had neither.

Still, Malfoy might have known what some of those circles meant, and the feathers, and the candles. Ron just stared and stared and took another gulp of ale to forget some of the things he'd seen when he'd accidentally slipped into Dumbledore's other memories.

Next year he'd look into spell symbolism and construction. It couldn't be that difficult, right?

-

**1947**

Ron threw a book across the room and, because it was that kind of spellbook, the book reversed course mid-flight and came rushing back at him. Would've hit him in the face, too, if Ron hadn't grown up with the twins and Ginny and developed pretty good reflexes for that sort of thing.

Right, he thought, as he cowered under his desk, waiting for the book to make another pass so he could hit it with a freezing spell, it was that difficult.

-

**1948**

When Albus Severus and Scorpius had got into that daughter of Voldemort and time turner mess thirty years ago, or seventy years later, or whenever it was (Ron's head was done in by this tome on the language of feathers, which might have very well been written in the language of feathers for all Ron understood of it, and he'd already had trouble keeping track of where he was in time), they'd only be in the past for a few brief seconds of the proper timeline. Ron really hoped that was the case with this spell too. Dumbledore would wake up and send Ron on his merry way back and he'd be happy, for the first time in his life, to see Malfoy Manor, and Hermione and Rose and Malfoy would all give him grief for going off to magic himself a beard because it wasn't funny, Ron/Dad/Weasley, _honestly_.

Ron put the book down. The summer holidays were coming up again. Students were telling him they'd miss him. (Him! He spent an entire lesson making fun of the Divination professor instead of actually teaching! Even a fourteen-year-old Minera McGonagall had laughed! Ron hadn't known McGonagall could laugh. Maybe he'd landed into an alternate universe from the start.) Ron, personally, missed the Hog's Head. Aberforth was a grumpy old bastard who smoked too much but he knew something about who Ron was, and he and Ron were in this project to get his brother back together.

And Ron wanted to tell Aberforth he was making progress. He'd figured out the possible meanings of the candles and the gems, at least. That just left the feathers, the chalk drawings, the runes, and, oh, yeah, the blood. Ron was going to have to visit Knockturn Alley this summer and see if there were any apothecaries there and if there were, he'd have to ask something like, excuse me, but do you have a dried blood sample chart? For comparison?

He was going to have to go as himself, too. He really hoped Knockturn Alley wasn't going to get raided but if it was, it was probably more dangerous to be there as Albus Dumbledore than a random Weasley. Or a random Weasley masquerading as a Dumbledore. Ron wondered if he should pretend he was from some continental or colonial branch. Rose no longer complained when he did Australian accents, but maybe she'd just mellowed with age.

Of course, what actually happened was that, in the middle of Ron assembling a croque en bouche to celebrate the end of another school year, Aberforth came up to him in the kitchen, wiping his hands on his robes, and said, calmly, "He's awake."

Ron jolted, turned to stare at Aberforth, and choux pastries went flying everywhere.

"Leave it." Aberforth used his wand to gather them and left them grouped precariously on the counter.

"What do you mean, he's awake?"

"I mean he woke up last week. I would've told you, but it was close to term's end and he needed to be caught up. It wouldn't have done any good."

Ron had the feeling that Aberforth wasn't telling him the exact truth, but he couldn't work out what. It was different with people who weren't your kids. "How'd you get him to wake up?"

Aberforth sucked his teeth. "I didn't. I walked in and he was sitting up in bed, a bit disoriented. I told him what year it was and he only said was it really? Could've punched him all over again."

"Thank you for restraining yourself," said Ron, his heart racing. Dumbledore was _awake_. He could go _home_. "I don't need to wait another five years for him to wake up again. Do you think I can see him?"

"Yeah," said Aberforth. "You may want to punch him yourself when you do, though."

-

Albus Dumbledore was sitting up in bed. He was wearing a nightshirt Ron was pretty sure he'd transfigured for himself from something of Aberforth's. It was peacock green and had lots of fiddly bronze embroidery on the sleeves and around the collar. Ron had spent his early life wearing hand-me-down clothes and secondhand robes and he was still never going to get used to Dumbledore's fashion sense. He'd spent a lot of the last five years staring at the contents of Dumbledore's wardrobe in despair and silently apologizing to his mum for making a fuss over maroon and lace. 

"Hello, sir," said Ron, even though they were the same age and Dumbledore was wearing a ridiculous nightie. Mum would never forgive him if he was rude to Albus Dumbledore. "Aberforth said you were awake."

"Yes," said Dumbledore. His hair was braided back and he looked pale and fragile. "I believe you've been substituting for me at school while I've been unconscious? Someone's been hacking at my beard and Aberforth usually keeps a pot of Polyjuice on the hob; I've never asked what he wants it for, less because of my legal obligation to report its use in a crime, and more because I really would prefer not to know."

Ron nodded. He felt that way about George, some of the time. "Came in handy, though. But now that you're back to normal, I won't need it."

Dumbledore picked up his teacup and did not meet Ron's eyes.

"You're healthy, right?" Ron asked. "I know you've been in a coma for a while and stasis spells aren't all that great, but you have two months and you could always go to St. Mungo's and tell them you ate something odd on holiday." Percy did, when he'd gone to Australia a few years back. But he'd grown this sort of frilly pink mustache like a sea creature. It had been hilarious. George had a giant photo of it hanging in his office, preserving both the mustache and Percy's rude hand gestures for posterity.

"I don't know," said Dumbledore, _finally_ , "whether this has been something I can recover from."

"Er." He looked fine to Ron. "You do in the timeline I'm from." Although in the timeline Ron was from, Dumbledore also defeated Grindelwald on his own and the food at the Hog's Head was rubbish. "I'm Ron Weasley. You accidentally summoned me from the future."

Dumbledore looked at him then. "Accidentally?"

Ron scratched the back of his head. "Aberforth punched you."

"As he is wont to do."

"I think it messed up the spell."

Dumbledore's gaze sharpened. "Why would you say that?"

"Because I was part of a house party that contained the best witch of her generation, a wizard who _did_ defeat a Dark Lord, some other Aurors, and a loser who spends all his time researching obscure magic because he doesn't have any friends," said Ron. "Any one of them would have done you more good in defeating Grindelwald than me. If your spell had been working properly it'd have taken one of them."

"Hmmm." Dumbledore steepled his fingers. "Are you sure it didn't get the right person after all? Aberforth says you defeated Grindelwald and successfully impersonated me for several years."

By sheer bloody luck. Ron really didn't want to start arguing about it, though. He could have died, loads of people could have died. Harry's shouting spells in their fifth and seventh years were becoming a lot more relatable. He settled for, "Look, I just want to go home. I've been gone for five years--"

"You have not."

Oh, it wasn't enough that Dumbledore was going to question Ron's estimation of different people's dark lord defeating powers, he was now arguing about how maths worked. 

"If the spell had worked as designed, it did not take you from your timeline. Rather, it duplicated you: the original you remains living your life, whereas the copy was brought back to this timeline. I felt it important to maintain equilibrium--and I did not want any more blood on my hands."

"Oi," said Ron. A copy? He was a _copy_ , and therefore it didn't _matter_? His fingers itched and he'd never understood Aberforth more than in that moment. "If I die here, I'm dead. It matters to me."

"Of course," said Dumbledore quickly.

"So what happens if I go back?" Would there be two of him? That might do Mum's head in a little. He tried to think about what that would be like, having and being his own twin. Weird. But it'd make housework a lot easier. Hermione might adjust to it pretty quickly.

Dumbledore frowned. Ron felt even more insulted that he hadn't even considered the possibility that the copy would survive and want to go home. But then, from what he knew of Dumbledore's life, and the things Aberforth had told him, maybe Albus Dumbledore didn't have that great an idea of what it was like to want to go home. It was like explaining Quidditch team loyalty to Hermione all over again. "You'd merge, I'd imagine. Forgive me, I never imagined you'd be stuck in this timeline for so long. The original plan was a matter of months: the differences that five years might have made could complicate things."

"It's okay," Ron reassured him. "I'm not that complicated a guy. When can you send me back?"

There was definitely a note of hesitation, an _oh shit I didn't plan for this_ , that Ron recognized from the many times he himself didn't plan for things and got caught out by Hermione. "I'll have to do some research," he said finally.

"Just tell me what books you need," said Ron. "Or go up to Hogwarts yourself. It's the summer holidays, you can live there while I help out here. Now that I know I've been there all along, I can wait a few more months to get back to my family, okay?"

Dumbledore winced. Then he smoothed down his robes and nodded. "May I ask how it was you knew me, from the future?"

Ron shrugged. "I mean, you defeated Grindelwald. Got a lot of awards, Order of Merlin and so on. Got on a chocolate frog card--"

"I did?" Dumbledore smiled at that, and Ron thought that maybe it would be all right after all, with Dumbledore sounding like the bloke he'd known, if not known very well, fifty years ago.

"Yeah. And you were headmaster when I was at Hogwarts."

Dumbledore snorted. "Merlin's pants."

"Aberforth can't believe it either. Says you aren't responsible enough, but maybe you're immature enough to understand the students, so it balances out."

That brought an end to Dumbledore's chortling. Ron almost regretted it, but he also had been picking up the slack for a few years and anyway, it wasn't exactly wrong. Children weren't like little adults. They were capricious, capable of great feats of imagination but not of noticing a link between staying up all night playing Exploding Snap and being cranky the next morning. Part of being a good dad and granddad, as Ron saw it, was understanding what children were thinking, and when they weren't.

But mostly he meant it in the sense that Dumbledore was acting like Rose had when she was younger and trying to unsubtly get out of babysitting her cousins. And as much as he loved Rose, it wasn't a favorable comparison.

-

In late August, Ron was roasting a few chickens and laying down all the spells he could to keep the Hog's Head kitchen from being a sweltering shoebox, when the owl came with a scroll and a lock of auburn hair tied with turquoise ribbon.

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

the scroll began.

_My research indicates that I will need resources beyond that of Hogwarts and its library, so I must beg you to take over my classes for yet another year. I've taken the liberty of leaving you more hair in my quarters._

_Yours sincerely,  
Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore_

Aberforth looked over the scroll and sniffed. "Told you not to have faith in him," he said.

"Nah," said Ron, more for show than because he actually meant it. "Anyway, I can't do all that fiddly research stuff, especially not while I'm teaching. It's probably easier if we split in two."

"I hope you're right," said Aberforth, in a tone that made it obvious he didn't think Ron was. But he broke out some gin, and the chickens turned out well, and maybe Hogwarts wouldn't be so bad when Ron knew that this year was his last.

Then he got to Hogwarts on August 31 and saw Dumbledore had left him the whole bloody beard, and a chopped-off braid. He must have cut his hair short, and it was far more than Ron needed for a year of Polyjuice.

He didn't tell Aberforth. Didn't want to let the old sod know he was right, and he didn't want to admit to himself that just because Dumbledore was back, it didn't mean that everything was going to be all right. 

-

**1949**

The next owl came to him in June.

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am writing to you from Tanzania. I dare say I am not familiar with the Ministry's future laws and regulations, but at this time temporal magic is, if not entirely illegal, then seriously limited in its expression and research. I have had to make my inquiries discreetly, and have yet to make much progress with regards to your situation, but rest assured I remain,_

_Your must humble servant,  
Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore_

Aberforth brought Ron a bottle of whiskey, one of the ones that made Ron feel like he'd stuck his head in a peat bog and the bog was on fire. He got a good laugh out of showing Aberforth the signature, and they drank to another bloody year of waiting for Albus.

-

**1950**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am in Peru--_

-

**1951**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am in Malaysia--_

-

**1952**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am in Iceland--_

-

**1953**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am in Madagascar--_

-

**1954**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I am in Egypt--_

"Yeah," said Ron, as he walked through the door, "I can see the Great Sphinx from your house."

Dumbledore dropped his reading and grabbed his wand. Ron tried not to panic because, well, Dumbledore was much better at this than he was. (And he was beginning to understand why--loads of people must have wanted to kill Dumbledore. He did, from time to time.) Ron hadn't exactly been practicing his dueling these days, or really any days since he'd stuck Gellert Grindelwald in Nurmengard. It hadn't seemed like he would need it.

"I come in peace," Ron said, holding up his hands. "And disappointment because you were lying to me, but, as my niece Victoire likes to say, if you don't start nothing there won't be nothing." He frowned, not sure if he'd gotten it wrong. Rose and Hugo had always found it deeply embarrassing when he used that expression, so he'd used it at every possible opportunity, wrong or not.

Dumbledore collected himself. He'd made a start on growing the beard and hair back. He'd taken the nicer pair of his spectacles, leaving Ron with the back-ups until he'd gone to the goblin ophthalmologist in London for a new one. (Goblin Ophthalmologist was also one of those screechy bands Albus Severus had liked when he'd gone through his "nobody understands me" phase. Ron knew this because Rose had complained so much that Ron had had to go to one of their shows. It hadn't been half bad but he'd spent the entire concert with his fingers twitching, wanting to case some mending spells on their robes.) He'd also had a new wardrobe made, one slightly more staid than Dumbledore's old one, which wasn't saying much, and stocked up on socks. "How did you find me?"

"You forget, mate," said Ron, and spread his maroon and gold sleeves. "I'm Albus Dumbledore. I have a network of contacts all over the world, all willing to be on the lookout for my doppelgänger if I ask them to. Only don't approach him--he's _very_ dangerous." Ron sighed. "Were you here in Bruges the entire time?"

Dumbledore had the grace to look abashed, although Merlin only knew if he actually felt it. "Should I put the kettle on, or would you prefer something stronger?"

"Stronger sounds nice," said Ron. Without thinking. He didn't need his mind fuddled for this conversation, but he _wanted_ his mind fuddled.

Dumbledore nodded. He left the sitting room--and, Ron realized half a moment later, could easily have Disapparated from the kitchen and called it a day, if he'd wanted to. Ron was having trouble reconciling the headmaster he remembered, who wouldn't have done that, with the wizard in the apricot and gold robes who had done just that, and lied repeatedly about it by owl. 

Instead, Dumbledore came back bearing biscuits, and a tea set that would have made Fleur green with envy. "I'll be mother," he said, and Ron really wished he hadn't mentioned mothers. He had no idea what his parents were doing back in the timeline he'd come from. He didn't think they'd been born yet in this one--no, wait, they had, but they were probably just beginning to walk and talk and, in Mum's case, boss people around.

Because he was thinking about his parents, and because pretending to be Dumbledore had left him with loads of practice in pretending to be wise by staying silent and dropping the occasional statement received as gnomic wisdom, Ron didn't say anything, and that seemed to make Dumbledore nervous enough to begin.

"I have been researching," he said. "The first three or four years, I spent visiting experts around the globe." He sighed and dipped a biscuit into his tea. "I don't know if things have changed significantly in your time, but presently most magic related to moving wizards--or anyone, or thing--through time is highly regulated at best, and entirely illegal at worst."

Ron nodded. "Yeah, you said. And in my time, the Department of Mysteries hoards time-turners, and even those were limited to short-term time travel."

"Were?"

"They get smashed," said Ron. "About forty years from now." He couldn't remember most of what had happened at the Ministry that night, especially not after the brains got to him, but Hermione and Luna and Ginny and Neville had mostly filled him in. Harry, to nobody's surprise, didn't like to talk about it. "Actually, most of the Department of Mysteries gets smashed." He wondered if there was a better technical term for it, then decided he didn't care. The important bit was the Department of Mysteries couldn't help them now.

"I see," said Dumbledore gravely. "Then you understand why my inquiries had to be discreet, and why the information I needed was scarce and scattered. And--" He paused, looking down into his teacup like he might find the answers there. "--they all said that sending someone forward through time couldn't be done."

But it could, Ron wanted to say. He'd seen it! He and Hermione and Harry and Ginny and Malfoy had gone nearly forty years forward in time. 

But, he thought, remembering Hermione's lectures about the progress of Muggle technology, and the sleekness of the Time Turner Harry had used, maybe the magic wasn't that advanced yet. The Time Turner Delphi had used was, if he remembered correctly, a bit of a mess. The kind of Time Turner that could go so far backward, and so far forward, in time might not have been invented yet, probably hadn't been invented yet, and he hadn't bothered to ask Harry where he'd gotten it, and Harry wasn't going to be born for another thirty years. Ron might have enough memories of Harry using it to stick them in a Pensieve and get Dumbledore to replicate it, but--he doubted it. And he remembered the jumble of Albus Severus and Scorpius's explanations for their behavior in 1981. Remembered that Albus Dumbledore needed to believe that Harry might not live. So he couldn't show Dumbledore it was possible--only try to convince him that it must be. "But you're Albus Dumbledore,' he said. "You discovered the twelve uses of dragon blood. You're the only one You-Know-Who was ever afraid of--"

"You-Know-Who?"

"Er, well, you don't, yet. But he was. Is. Will be. And you--" Ron had been about to go on with "defeated Grindelwald," but Dumbledore hadn't. That had been Ron, this time around. "Well, in my timeline, you defeated Grindelwald."

"Did I," said Dumbledore.

Ron didn't say, Yes, you did, and without ruining any poor innocent bystanding bastard's life in the process, but he _wanted_ to.

"Did I kill him?" Dumbledore's voice sounded distant and strange.

"No," said Ron. "You defeated him, took the Elder Wand, and locked him up in Nurmengard until he died."

"Ah." Dumbledore broke a biscuit into pieces with one hand, pushed the crumbs onto the saucer. He'd gotten a new pair of spectacles, ones with little flourishes of gold where the lenses met the earpieces. His eyes, beneath the glasses, stared down at the crumbs like they were the only thing in the world.

"Did you think you were going to kill him? After what he did to your sister?"

Dumbledore looked up then. "You know," he said, still distant, still strange. "I don't know who did it. It wasn't the killing curse, it was--an accident. I was afraid Gellert might tell me who truly did it, but I don't think he knows either. And Aberforth must have told you it was Gellert, because I don't think he could bear it if it had been his spell--or mine, for that matter." He smiled one of those smiles that wasn't really a smile, the kind of smile Ron usually saw on Malfoy's face. "I haven't been anything like the best of brothers. But that's family for you."

"Did you want to kill him?" Ron hadn't been meaning to ask that until the words had left his mouth.

Dumbledore sighed. "Shall I tell you," he said, "what my greatest fear is?"

"That the thing that eats your left socks has grown big enough that it can now eat you?" Ron asked. "Seriously, you should have got the groundskeeper to look at it, that thing is terrifying, and now I'm afraid it'll eat the Care of Magical Creatures professor if I ask him to deal with it."

"Armand would never hurt a fly." Dumbledore was smiling, but if he'd liked Armand so much, he should have taken the old woolly bugger with him. "I.... When I met Gellert, he had no particular quarrel with Muggles. He didn't much care for them, but he did not... his concerns were power, and the Hallows, and proving that he was exactly as brilliant as he thought he was. Durmstrang didn't hold Muggles in high esteem, and there have always been wizards who thought they ought to rule over the Muggles, but Gellert... after Ariana died, he made it his mission. And I sometimes had the horrible suspicion that he was doing it for me: because if the Muggle boys had not attacked my sister, I could have gone off on his quest with him; if they had not attacked her, there would have been no duel, no wild burst of magic attempting to stop it, no stray curse to kill her." He frowned. "Of course, if the Muggle boys hadn't attacked her, both my parents would have lived, and never moved to Godric's Hollow, and I'd have gone on my year abroad and never met Gellert, but logic was never his strong suit."

Ron remembered Grindelwald's pasty face hurling accusations of ingratitude at him. "You think he did all of that for you?"

"Not for me," said Dumbledore. He absolutely did. "I only fear that I gave him a cause, and it made him far more dangerous than he might have been otherwise; and if that were the case, how could I face him? And how could I face myself?"

Ron sat back in his chair. "When I was seventeen," he said finally, "I abandoned my best friends when they needed me most. There were extenuating circumstances, I'm not going to lie, but I still fucked off because I felt tired and misunderstood. And I regretted it, a lot. And even though I went back and tried to make up for it, I still feel bad about it sometimes. But you can't change the past. You can only change how you think about the past to help you live in the present."

Dumbledore smiled slightly. "Wise words."

"Thanks," said Ron. That thing about the past was actually something Malfoy had said to him to justify his lack of sniveling contrition, but Ron had chosen to be the better person and see how it could apply to his own regrets. "What's done is done. Now, let's have another biscuit and then we can--"

The spell came out of nowhere, knocking Ron backwards in his chair. The blast didn't slam him into the wall--there was a sort of cushion of air behind him, and he bounced between that and the original blast, and then he fell off the chair onto the carpet, and when he got up, Dumbledore was gone. So were the biscuits.

In their place was another bloody scroll.

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

it began.

Ron growled and shoved it into the pocket of his robes.

-

**1955**

_My dearest Mr Weasley,_

_I can only apologize for what I have done, and what I am about to do. I hope you will forgive me, but understand if you will not; I find it difficult to forgive myself._

_But it is not my conscience--at least, not solely my conscience--that I base this decision upon. I believe that I can live with my regrets, my fears: I have done so, for a certain value of living, for seventy-odd years now. It is because I am not the wizard who defeated Gellert Grindelwald, nor am I the deputy headmaster of Hogwarts. You have become, in the last decade, what I am not, and what, I believe, the wizarding world needs to survive the next dark lord. And I cannot be that wizard, with all that I have done and have not done weighing upon me._

_I am truly sorry._

_Yours most sincerely,  
Albus Dumbledore_

"You were right," Ron told Aberforth, accepting a tumbler full of Firewhisky. "And I should have punched him in the face."

-

**1956**

"I take heart," said Ron, lying through his teeth, "that none of you have seen any more Dumble-gangers."

McGonagall shot him an entirely unamused look, having grown out of his terrible sense of humor around the time she was fifteen. He didn't think she'd laughed at the real Dumbledore's jokes either. And pretty soon Ron was going to be her boss. He couldn't wrap his head around it.

"That does not mean, however, that the threat has diminished."

"Constant vigilance," harrumphed Moody. Ron couldn't really believe he was going to be Moody's boss either, and he already felt bad about the part where he got locked in a trunk for a whole year while someone nefariously harvested his hair and impersonated him. And also a little hypocritical. Given a chance, he'd lock Albus Dumbledore in a trunk until he capitulated.

"What about the one I saw in Belgium?"

"Ah," said Ron. "That was well done, Elphias, and I commend you for your work. He and I had a conversation on the perils of pretending to be Albus Dumbledore and both of us came away the wiser for it. I don't think he'll show his face again."

Which was technically true, but really not the outcome Ron had been hoping for. Dumbledore hadn't truly been in hiding before, but he must be now, and all Ron could do was wait for him to make the same mistake twice. It wasn't the best of plans, but then Ron wasn't exactly Albus Dumbledore. And that was the problem.

-

**1957**

Aberforth frowned at Ron when he came into the kitchen with a new load of firewood. "Thought you were saving the hair for the school year."

"What?" said Ron, poking at the potatoes with his wand to check if they were done. 

"I said, I thought you weren't Polyjuicing unless you had to."

"I'm not." Ron summoned a mirror and looked at himself, just to be sure the face looking back at him wasn't Albus Dumbledore's. And it wasn't. His hair was going white and his face was getting thin, but-- "Huh," he said. He wasn't wearing glasses and his nose was straight, but he didn't look all that different from the headmaster he remembered, give or take forty years. He scratched under his beard. "We have similar faces." It'd come in handy when the real Dumbledore's hair ran out.

Aberforth frowned some more, dumped the wood on the woodpile and crossed his arms. "It's odd," he said finally.

"What is?"

Aberforth shrugged, and went back out towards the bar.

"Oi!" Ron yelled after him. "What's odd?" Bloody Dumbledores.

-

**1958**

The face in the mirror was his, and then it wasn't. Or it wasn't his, and then it was. Being another person was categorically doing Ron's head in. He once went without the potion just to test if other people would notice the difference, but Dumbledore's glasses hurt his head and made it hard to see if he was actually fooling anyone. No one shouted, "Imposter!" or grabbed him by the back of his robes and dragged him off to the Ministry, so there was that.

"Sod it," Ron told the face in the mirror, "I'm taking a sabbatical."

-

**1959**

He did feel sort of wonky at first, going off the Polyjuice Potion. It was like a low-grade hangover, except a little more disorienting and a lot more constipating. But soon enough the only face looking back at Ron from the mirror was Ron's--which he should have been used to, because that was what it had been like every morning when he woke up during the school year, and all those summer holidays he'd spent at the Hog's Head, but he kept looking and thinking that something wasn't quite right. Maybe it was just getting old. His hair was white. He had wrinkles! He had a reason for the worry lines that wasn't maybe one day Hermione might leave him for an automatic legislating quill, or that his daughter would marry a Malfoy. Although his daughter _had_ married a Malfoy, and a fat lot of good all that worrying had done him there.

"What d'you think?" he asked Aberforth.

"About what?"

"I'm not taking Polyjuice anymore!" Ron spread his arms wide so Aberforth could get a look at Ron Weasley in his natural form and Albus Dumbledore's unnatural clothes. "And I've been gone a year and you didn't even ask how it went."

Aberforth sighed, and looked up. "How'd it go, then?"

"Terrible," said Ron. "I'm never going to Florida again."

"My brother's friend Newt likes Florida," said Aberforth. "Almost as much as he likes Australia. Apparently they have a lot of interesting monsters." He put down the glass he was cleaning. "Something's not right."

"No shit, Rowena," said Ron. Something hadn't been right for years. Ronald Bilius Weasley was a man out of time. 

Aberforth ignored that, got up and peered at him. "Hand me your spectacles."

Ron did. "They're just clear glass. I had them made in America. My eyesight is--ow!" He clapped his hands over his nose, where Aberforth had punched him. "What the--"

"Albus's is broken," said Aberforth. "Bit of a giveaway if yours isn't."

"You could have warned me." Ron scrounged around for the Elder Wand to stop the bleeding. And then to get the stains out of the sleeves of the robe, which had sopped up a lot of blood. The Elder Wand was really good at household charms.

"Would you've let me do it if I had?"

"Uh." Ron thought about it for a second. For an old man, Aberforth Dumbledore threw a mean punch. "Probably not, no."

"So," said Aberforth, and poured himself a drink.

Ron remembered what Dumbledore had been like as headmaster, and had to wonder if smugness ran in that family. "Could I have one of those?" He conjured up some ice and a cloth, and stuck it on his nose. He couldn't even spell it right, because it was supposed to heal crooked. How did Muggles live without real medicine? Ron took a moment to mourn that he could no longer ask Hermione that for her outraged reaction, and to mourn that he was no longer the sort of person who asked questions like that for the outraged reaction. He was now the sort of person who said things for an outraged reaction. It was going to be a big change. 

There was a bit of a silver lining, though. People let you get away with that sort of thing when you'd defeated a dark lord and were their best hope against the next one.

-

**1960**

Woggledinks read out, "Prewett, Molly!" and Ron very nearly lost it.

It was his mum, standing below the high table. Clambering onto the stool and jamming the Sorting Hat on her head, not that she needed very long before it shouted, "Gryffindor!" Her nervous smile split open into a full grin and she looked over to Fabian and Gideon, who were clapping and stamping over at the Gryffindor table.

Ron had had them in his classes for a few years now and it had been weird at first, but they'd been dead by the time he was born, so he'd never really known his uncles. His mum, on the other hand, was tiny. She was uncertain. It was so weird and he barely, barely had time to pull himself together before it was Weasley, Arthur's turn, and Dad was tiny too. He didn't have glasses yet. He had all his hair! The last time Ron had seen Dad, Dad had been completely bald, half-blind, and verging on frail. 

Albus Dumbledore's life, or at least existence, had been Ron's for a while now, and he'd gotten used to it, but now--now everything he was missing, his real family, his friends, _Hermione_ \--hit him and for a second he couldn't even breathe.

"Are you all right, Headmaster?" asked McGonagall.

Ron shut his eyes, steeled himself. "Oh, yes," he said. His voice wavered. "The start of a new school year always makes me rather sentimental. I suppose it's all the fresh new faces, and the knowledge that they will all grow up so fast. One has to wonder where the time goes."

-

He was not keeping it together. His parents were here! At Hogwarts! And they were tiny! Minuscule! Dad tried to sign up for Muggle Studies even though he couldn't take it until third year. Mum got a detention a week in for dueling. Every single first year Gryffindor Transfiguration class he taught, Ron thought he was going to have a heart attack. They were so small and precious and fragile.

By now, Ron thought, in his own timeline, they'd be fragile too, but in a different way. Dad's hearing was probably as gone as his hair. Mum would be struggling to keep her grandkids' names right--she'd already had trouble with the great-grandchildren's when Ron had last seen her, but that wasn't memory, it was the consequences of having seven kids and five of them having kids of their own, and most of those having kids of their own, too. And just because his other self was there, that other Ron, it didn't mean Ron didn't miss them. Didn't wish he could be there helping them in their old age even though they drove him mad. Scorpius Malfoy kept plying Dad with Muggle gadgets that no one, not even Hermione, knew how to use, and then not being there when Dad inevitably Flooed for help getting his iGoggles to work. Ron would have killed to help Dad with his iGoggles now.

He was missing his life. He felt stranded here, useless. Well, not useless, because someone had to be Albus Dumbledore, and the real one wasn't up to it this time around.

Ron made the mistake of getting drunk and stumbling into Horace Slughorn, who was a lot more solicitous of the Ron who'd defeated a Dark Lord. He loomed over Slughorn and poked him in the chest. "You used to not even know my name," he slurred, hiccoughed, and then lurched off to bed, where he dreamed of Albus Dumbledore shoving stones down his throat until Ron sank to the bottom of the Hogwarts lake, and there was no Harry to pull him out.

-

**1961**

"Yes," said Ron, swigging the ale Aberforth offered him, "but how am I supposed to be Headmaster?"

"How was my brother supposed to be the headmaster?" asked Aberforth. "You've helped me running this inn, that's more management than my brother has done in his entire life. Besides, you knew this was coming, didn't you?"

"I was sort of hoping he'd come round on embracing his responsibilities thing."

Aberforth snorted. "Not while you're here to do it for him, he won't. Besides, he liked being a teacher. Being Headmaster wouldn't be anything to come back for."

Ron laid his head down on his arms. "Merlin. Well, at least I won't have to spend any more time trying not to have panic attacks while I'm teaching my mum to turn frogs into tea cozies."

-

**1962**

Elphias Doge reported seeing a vaguely Albus-like wizard in Aruba. Minerva McGonagall gave Ron a rather strict glare when he, barely a year into being Headmaster, took a month off to investigate. 

Ron remembered Dumbledore doing rather a lot of this when he was a student at Hogwarts, so he supposed it was in character. And it wasn't like he did anything either. Ron had been getting all the wrong ideas about administrative jobs from Hermione.

Aruba was empty of Dumbledores, though. Ron wondered if Elphias had been a little too deep in his cups that night, or Dumbledore had spotted him back, realized he'd been seen, and kept moving.

At least the boat was nice. Well worth the trip, in Ron's opinion. The sky was sunny and the ocean was calm and there was an Olympic-sized pool below decks and a well-stocked kitchen and bar. The house elf liked to do fruit platters and kebabs and could mix any drink Ron asked him to, even when they were in the middle of the Atlantic and there was nary a guava in sight.

"We can't ever know," he said, helped himself to another grape.

"Can't ever know what, sir?" asked Boaty, dropping more mint into Ron's watermelon and vodka sludge before checking the fish on the grill.

"What it is we don't know," said Ron, and helped himself to another grape. "Hey, have you seen a wizard who looks like me, Boaty? But much more smug, and with worst taste in robes."

"Boaty isn't sure that's possible, sir," Boaty muttered, and went back to the grill, bless him.

-

**1963**

It wasn't that Ron forgot, precisely. But it had been a long time since he was seventeen and not only had a lot gone on since then, there had been a lot going on at the time. They'd been at war, and he and Lavender had been snogging each other senseless until he'd started hiding from her, and the Quidditch matches had been really hard that year, and Hermione had gone to a party with Cormac McClaggen, of all people, and Ron had almost died. He couldn't be blamed for not remember every single one of Harry's lessons with Dumbledore that year, could he? He thought it should be enough that he remembered Harry had had lessons with Dumbledore in the first place, when it was more like him to remember something less important and much weirder, like Harry had stalked Draco Malfoy all year long and then stopped once he started making out with Ron's sister. Those were the kind of priorities a healthy sixteen- or seventeen-year-old had.

Still, a shiver ran down his spine when he received the owl.

_I'm afraid I'm too busy during term,_ he wrote back. _Let us talk during the winter holidays._

Voldemort was still Voldemort, and Ron wasn't letting him anywhere near the Hogwarts castle while his mum and dad were at school there. Not only could Ron wink out of existence, they were his _mum_ and his _dad_. Ron wouldn't have wanted Voldemort around them at any age.

It was snowing when Voldemort finally showed up. _Riddle_ , Ron reminded himself. _Call him Tom Riddle. It annoys him._ And he didn't look all that much like Voldemort yet, but he didn't look like the teenager Ron remembered either. His skin was the color of hard cheese. His eyes looked like he hadn't slept in decades. There was a sort of stink of madness about him, the type you could almost feel emanating from certain Muggles on the London Underground, or on the telly, representing the Tories.

He was going to kill loads of people. He probably already had. But he was here to hide a horcrux, and there were lots of others stashed only god knew where--Bellatrix was a student who didn't have access to the Lestrange vault yet, and probably hadn't even met Voldemort, and who knew when the diary had been given to the Malfoys (he hadn't asked Rose's in-laws because not talking to the Malfoys unless he absolutely had to was the kind of priority a healthy wizard of any age had), and the locket wasn't put in the cave until close to Regulus Black's death, and Ron couldn't even be sure Regulus had been born yet. It was too early to do anything.

Still, he wanted to punch Voldemort in his stupid not-yet-snakey face until the little snot saw the error of his ways.

"So," he said, swirling around some of Aberforth's worst brandy, which he kept on hand for parents who disliked how he ran the school, and governors who thought the same, and could also be used to strip paint in a pinch, "tell me, Tom, what brings you here tonight?"

"They don't call me that anymore. They call me--"

Ron waved a hand. "I know what they call you, Tom," he said, and he could see the face tightening even further, the rictus of his scowl, the narrowing of his eyes. It was still sort of wild to see Lord Voldemort with a _nose_. "Let us dispense with all of that. Let us assume that I know more about how this ends than you do."

"I doubt that," said Voldemort, nostrils flaring. "I doubt that very much."

Ron laughed. He couldn't help himself.

It pissed Voldemort off to no end.

"Look," said Ron, because it had been a long twenty years, because he was tired, because this wasn't his job, and because maybe Dumbledore hadn't done everything right, the first time around, because he liked his uncles, Fabian and Gideon, because he didn't want to break his tiny mum's heart, "whatever it is you're doing, whatever it is you want, you're not going to get it. You're better walking away from it all now. Go live on an island somewhere. Get some sun. It looks like you could use it."

Voldemort had got to his feet, livid with rage. He could definitely do with a tan, Ron thought. "Is that your final answer?" he asked, like he was hosting some Muggle game show.

"It won't make you happy, Tom."

For a second Ron really thought that Voldemort would attack him. But the legend of Dumbledore, the threat of Dumbledore, must have stopped him, and instead he stomped out, trembling with rage.

Ron helped himself to some more of the terrible brandy. He was trembling a little himself. "That," he told himself, because Hermione wasn't here to do it for him, "was incredibly stupid, Ronald."

And then he drank.

-

**1964**

"No luck in Tibet?" Aberforth asked.

"Fuck all," said Ron. "Doesn't mean he's not in Tibet, it just means I couldn't find him there."

Aberforth shrugged. "Didn't think he would be. He likes a certain amount of creature comfort my brother." But what Aberforth would know of creature comforts, Ron hadn't the faintest clue. He let the goats sleep in the kitchen in the winter. Ron was sure the goats liked it, but it stank up the entire inn.

"You could have told me that, before I traveled halfway around the world."

Aberforth shrugged again. "You could've asked."

-

**1965**

"I'm merely wondering," said Ron, "if perhaps your family has a vested interest in proclaiming its superiority over Muggleborns and halfbloods, since it means they never have to actually prove it to themselves."

Bellatrix Black, with big silver eyes and lace edging her robes and her hair in ringlets-- _ringlets_ \--stared up at Ron with a thoughtful look on her twelve-year-old face and said, finally, "Piss off, old man."

-

**1966**

"You're not Albus," said Gellert Grindelwald and it stopped Ron short. He almost turned around and left then and there. Most people couldn't tell, and it wasn't like Aberforth didn't already know, and even if Ron might have prepared bluffing his way through anything Elphias Doge or Horace Slughorn might have said, they weren't a dangerous dark lord with a weird fixation on Albus Dumbledore, if Albus Dumbledore was to be believed, which Ron was having more and more trouble with these days. 

Fawkes knew, but the bloody bird didn't seem to care as long as Ron kept him fed and his nest lined with old robes.

"You're right," he said, too flummoxed to come up with a proper lie. "I'm not."

Grindelwald's wonky yellow eyes narrowed. Ron had to wonder what it was about being evil that turned a normal-looking bloke into someone who'd been target practice for every spell in the book of uglifying curses. He'd have suspected it was a side effect of Dark Magic, but it happened to Muggles too.

Ron, because he'd been pretending to be Dumbledore for way too long already, sat down on the bench outside Grindelwald's cell door and rearranged his robes. "I'm his body double. He usually has me sit in on things like Wizengamot meetings and Hogwarts ceremonies when he's too busy or too bored."

"So why isn't he here?" rasped Grindelwald.

Ron raised his gaze and looked straight into those wonky eyes. "Oh, I think we both know why he's not here."

Grindelwald glowered at him. Ron just leaned back against the wall, got comfortable on the bench. He'd beaten him, after all. Great dark lord, scrounge of Europe, terror in America, the beast in the Far East, the pasty thunder Down Under and all that, and he, Ronald Bilius Weasley, had beaten him in a fair duel. He shouldn't be scared of Grindelwald. He was a little scared of Voldemort still, or maybe a lot scared because Voldemort was going to kill lots of people before eventually bollocking it all up as far as eternal life went, and Ron had been raised to be scared of Voldemort, but Grindelwald was stuck here for the next thirty years. He was going to die here, and Ron knew it.

Hermione was right. Knowledge was power.

Eventually Grindelwald stopped trying to murder Ron with his stare like he thought was a basilisk. Maybe he did. He really wasn't all there in the head, for all that he was the first person to see through Ron's disguise. "I want to speak to Dumbledore."

"Tough," said Ron.

"Do you think I would help _you_?"

"Why not?" said Ron. "It sounds like you'd help Dumbledore and he was the one who put you in here in the first place."

Grindelwald clenched his fists. His nostrils flared. 

"And by helping me, you'd be helping Dumbledore."

"You said it yourself," snarled Grindelwald. "Why would I want to help him? He put me here. He _left_ me here." He was beginning to sound unbalanced. Which, well, not a shock. He'd sounded unbalanced the last time Ron had met him, and twenty years in prison couldn't have helped. There weren't any Dementors here, but still, as Hermione had argued decades from now, wizards were imprisoned with a focus on punishment and not rehabilitation. And sure, it was a little difficult to stomach murderers sitting comfortably and doing arts after all the damage they'd inflicted, but on the other hand Delphi had turned out to be quite good at pottery. Ron and Hermione had a faux-rustic dining set in dusty purple and gold she'd made. Hermione brought it out whenever they were entertaining Ministry bigwigs. It cleaned up like a charm, and hadn't poisoned anyone yet.

"Maybe you can help yourself," said Ron. "And you strike me as somebody who needs all the help he can get."

Grindelwald tilted his head. "That almost sounded like Albus."

"What can I say," said Ron, and spread his arms. "I'm a natural."

The speed at which Grindelwald went from raging to calm and considering worried Ron. Was he that good an actor or was he that unstable? And either way, could Ron rely on him? (The answer was no. Aberforth had made that abundantly clear before Ron had left to do this, but Aberforth was biased and Ron needed to talk to a Seer and he didn't know anyone else with prophetic powers.) "And how would I be helping myself?"

Ron shrugged. "We've been hearing things about a new dark lord. Trying to head him off before he becomes too much of a threat, but the way I see it, if he does become a big bad dark lord, it'll overshadow your reign of terror, and twenty years from now, everyone will be asking, Grindelwho? I want you to use your Seer powers to check if there is going to be a dark lord in Britain in the future, and to keep us posted."

"I'm not--"

"I cleared it with your guards," Ron said. "They'll get you parchment and quills, but you're only allowed to send things to Dumbledore."

Grindelwald's eyes glittered. And there were no arguments after that.

-

**1967**

"I wouldn't dream of dissuading you from your family's evil ways," Ron told a young and indignant Lucius Malfoy. "I merely want to dissuade you from that disaster of a hairstyle."

-

**1968**

_Albus,_

came the letter.

_Your idiot doppelgänger came to see me. He thinks I have visions on_ command! _In this cold stone cell, without any of my apparati, he thinks I can call up specific instances of the future, search for specific individuals, speak to specific queries! Albus, he is an imbecile._

"Rude," said Ron.

_Albus, I have seen the future. I have never stopped seeing the future. And Muggles remain the greatest threat to us, and to themselves, and to the planet. I HAVE SEEN CLIMATE CHANGE, ALBUS. You must release me from my confinement. I will bludgeon Boris Johnson, I will murder Mitch McConnell, I will obliterate Osama bin Laden, I will strangle Seth McFarlane. I can stop the Muggles from spreading so much unhappiness if you will only give me a chance, Albus. You must give me a chance._

_Oh, and as to your original question: whatever steps you and your fat doppelgänger are taking to stop the next dark lord, they aren't working. I can kill him for you too. Albus, you must. Albus, you need me._

_Yours,  
Gellert Grindelwald_

"I'm not fat," said Ron, showing the piece of parchment to Aberforth. "I'm not."

"I told you not to trust him."

Ron sighed. "Good, because my trousers have been getting a bit tight, but I thought the house elves might have been shrinking them in the wash--"

"I meant about the Muggles."

"Rude," said Ron, and helped himself to another chocolate frog. 

Aberforth rolled his eyes, and took a chocolate frog too. He bit its head off. "He'll say anything he thinks will get my brother to listen, and once my brother starts listening, well. It's a good thing he's not here. My brother's a bigger idiot than you are."

"Oi," said Ron. He got no respect.

-

**1969**

"I don't see how this is the Slytherin prefect's duty," seethed Lucius Malfoy, siphoning up the flood of water from the first floor boys' bathroom.  
"Yours is not to reason why," said Ron. "Sherbert lemon?"

"Surely this is what Filch is for! Or the house elves!"

Ron ate the sherbert lemon himself. He hadn't really wanted to waste a perfectly good sweet on a perfectly bad wizard, but he'd also hoped it would give Lucius spots. "Oh, no, the house elves are busy making rumbledethumps for the leaving feast."

"Rumblede--" 

"--thumps," Ron finished serenely. 

Lucius narrowed his eyes. Before he got back to work cleaning up the loos, he said something along the lines of "my father will hear about this," Ron was sure of it.

-

**1970**

The trick to Headmastering, Ron had discovered, was not to take it too seriously. He knew that when he'd been at Hogwarts he'd been alternately amused and bemused by how little Dumbledore seemed to care about running the school, but he got it, now, because there was so much to do he felt he'd go mad if he tried to get it all done well. Besides, he had McGonagall as Deputy Headmistress, and she was much better at all of this than he was. He was extremely glad that she'd taken over before Rose and Hugo went to Hogwarts, though. He wouldn't have sent his kids to Hogwarts while Dumbledore was Headmaster. Or while he himself was Headmaster, come to think of it. Hermione wouldn't have let him.

Still, Ron did his best to make the students feel at home. Voldemort was out in the world, gathering power. Ron could read it in between the lines in short _Daily Prophet_ articles about mysterious disappearances. Muggle murders. A snake and skull in the Lake District and no one knew what it meant. Well, Ron knew what it meant, but he couldn't very well tell anyone. His information was too complete, and the only way he'd have had to explain it would be blaming Grindelwald's prophecies, and then they'd want to know about why he was still in touch with Gellert Grindelwald, and that would be opening a whole new can of Flobberworms, especially if Grindelwald decided to share that Ron wasn't Dumbledore, just someone who was pretending to be him for strategic purposes. He wasn't Dark Lord-defeating material. (Well, he'd done it once, but Grindelwald had mostly defeated himself by being too deranged to function.) He was, however, pretty good at dealing with adolescents. He had two children, three grandchildren, about a dozen nephews and nieces and their children. He knew how to make them feel better about scraped knees and failed OWLs and humiliating Quidditch games. 

So when Ron came across a crying boy in one of the first floor corridors, he clapped him on the shoulder and conjured a handkerchief out of thin air.

"Cheer up," he said, tousling the boy's mousy brown hair. "It may never happen."

And then the boy glanced up at him with a tremulous, watery smile, and Ron saw it was Peter Pettigrew, and it was all he could do not to shout and jump away.

-

**1971**

"Are you sure nothing's changed?" Ron asked.

Grindelwald glanced up at him and yawned theatrically. "Albus told you of my letter?"

"He gave me your letter to read. He has better things to do."

That got Grindelwald's attention, and it was just as unpleasant as it had been the last time around. "You dare--"

"It was ten percent answer to his question, ninety percent ranting about how much you want to kill Muggles," Ron said, and folded his arms. "He has a war to fight and a school to run and he's not quite given up trying to knit scarves yet. He really doesn't want to read about your Muggle murder plans."

"I don't want to murder them," Grindelwald said sulkily. "Well, all right, I want to murder a select few thousand, but it's only so I can rule the rest and help them make better decisions. It's all for the greater good."

Ron stared at him.

"What?" snarled Grindelwald.

"How do you feel about tricking house elves into freeing themselves when they don't want to for their own good?"

Grindelwald rolled his eyes. "Who cares about house elves?"

Well, thought Ron, that was a relief. For a second he'd been reminded of Hermione, and he--he missed Hermione terribly. He'd spent decades trying not to dwell on her, because it hurt too badly, but now he would do anything, anything to get back to her. If Grindelwald knew anything about time travel magic, Ron would have let him free on that one condition. If Voldemort had known anything about time travel magic, Ron might even have been tempted to ask him for help, not that he could have trusted him to deliver. Delphi was a little more honorable, but he couldn't wait for Delphi, not that she'd understood the theories behind what she was doing anyway, or for Draco Malfoy to do whatever his excuse for maturing was and gather a surprising amount of knowledge on the topic. Draco Malfoy had done far too much research into far too many weird things as an adult, and it wasn't even helpful now.

"I care about house elves," he said. "The poor sods have to all these things to please their masters, even if they don't want to do them. And they convince themselves that it's normal. That it's right and good. That that's just the way the world is."

"So you _do_ see my point!" Grindelwald clapped his hands. "We must stop kowtowing to the Muggles! We are--"

"You know what, I'm going to let Dumbledore deal with you from now on after all," said Ron, and he turned and left.

-

**1972**

There was no word from--well, they were going to be the Order of the Phoenix soon enough, but right now they were Dumbledore's friends, or flunkies, or some combination of the two. And soon enough lots of them would be dead. Ron shifted uneasily in his seat, stared down into his drink. "Maybe," he said, "maybe I should just kill Snape. That'd sort things out."

"Severus Snape?" asked Aberforth, who didn't understand. He made an attempt to, though, and Ron appreciated it. No one else understood his mad predicament. "Isn't he all of twelve years old?"

"Yeah," said Ron moodily. "You haven't met the adult Snape, though. The adult Snape never met a kid he didn't want to kill, he'd appreciate it." 

Aberforth just looked at Ron, and Ron sighed. "Sure. No killing children."

"You didn't want to kill Tom Riddle as a child," Aberforth reminded him.

"He didn't annoy me half as much."

-

**1973**

There was a hush over the Great Hall that morning. Ron knew he'd have to come up with a reassuring speech, but, frankly, every time he thought about the headlines in the _Prophet_ , all he wanted to open his mouth for was to vomit. Even McGonagall had covered her mouth, excused herself, and hurried off.

A mixed family, Muggles and wizards. Three children, parents, a sister-in-law, a grandfather. All dead under the same roof in Yorkshire. The Muggles said it was a leak of some sort, but the Killing Curse was obvious to any wizard with half a wand, and there'd been an emerald skull and serpent floating over the house all night.

Sooner or later, Ron would be called into Ministry meetings, and he'd have to keep his mouth shut. He didn't know how much the Ministry knew, but he couldn't very well say that the people who'd done this called themselves the Death Eaters, and their leader called himself Lord Voldemort. And that whatever the Aurors and Unspeakables and Defense Analysts thought, this wasn't the first attack, and it would be far from the last.

Not all the students were silent and teary-faced. Some of the Slytherins looked remarkably unconcerned, some of the Ravenclaws were burying their heads in books, some of the Hufflepuffs were burying their grief in food (and it really was good food, Ron thought; if he'd put on weight, it was the house elves' fault), and down at the Gryffindor table there were a few students who were grim or defiant.

James Potter--who, Merlin's balls, looked a lot like Harry, and even more like Harry's son James--announced, "I'm going to become an Auror!"

_No,_ Ron thought. _No, you're not, you're going to go into hiding before you can finish training, and then you're going to die._ He tried not to look at Peter Pettigrew, down the bench from James, or at Sirius Black, or Remus Lupin, or Lily Evans.

When he'd first met Harry, when he'd been eleven, Harry's dead parents had seemed wholly adult to him because they were _parents_ and Ron was eleven, but they'd only been twenty-two. Practically babies.

Knowing what he knew now--that Dumbledore might never take back his life, and the war, and all this bloody responsibility again--Ron wondered if he should have done it differently. Hit Riddle with the Killing Curse when he was only sixteen, resemblance to Fabian and objection to killing children be damned. He might have messed with the future, but the future was full of misery and pain and death. Whatever else he could have said about the real Dumbledore's mismanagement of the war, at least Dumbledore didn't know how bad things had gotten, how bad things would get. He would even die before Voldemort took over the Ministry, the lucky sod. Dumbledore had done the best he could, and here Ron was, not doing the best he could because--because what? He lacked imagination? He had faith in Dumbledore? Ron was pretty sure that if Dumbledore's spell had gotten Hermione instead of him, she wouldn't have hesitated to change the future, and Harry might not have been able to help himself. And right now, he was terrified to think that maybe, just maybe, Dumbledore hadn't grabbed Ron from the future by mistake.

-

**1974**

And he had to hire a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher every year. Did Voldemort have any idea how annoying that much bloody paperwork was? Every year? "Evil," Ron muttered to himself, and ticked the box on the form that said prematurely deceased (magical flora/fauna-related incident).

-

**1975**

"Thing is," Ron told Aberforth, taking another shot of Firewhisky. His nostrils were burning. Little puffs of smoke streamed along his mustache. "Tonks. Was just born. Right on schedule."

"Am I supposed to know who that is?" Aberforth was also getting drunk, but at a much slower pace.

Ron stared glumly at the bottle. It wasn't even cobwebbed. Didn't fit the rest of the decor. Maybe the only impact he was having was on Aberforth's liquor purchases. He didn't see how that could butterfly effect out and bite him on the arse, but it'd find a way. He'd have gone through all that trouble to keep to the timeline that Dumbledore had lived through and somehow something about barley would be the end of the world. "She becomes an Auror. She dies. Her husband dies. Her dad dies. Her aunt dies and good fucking riddance to that evil fuck, but my point is, I know all of that, all of her life already and I'm not even born yet."

"You should go to bed."

"I should go _home_ ," Ron said. "I should bloody well go home."

Aberforth poured him another drink. "We all should go home," he said. "But mine's not there anymore. And yours isn't there yet. So we've got to muddle on as best we can."

Ron blew him a raspberry, then sank his head onto his arms. He was going to feel bloody awful in the morning, but then, that wouldn't be much different from every other morning, these days.

-

**1976**

Finally, Elphias came through. Ron wasn't expecting it of the pint-sized squeaker, but it turned out Elphias Doge had a lot of academic contacts and he trusted enough of them to have his own network out looking for Dumbledore imposters, and one of them owled to let him know there'd been a sighting at a beach resort she'd holidayed at in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean. Ron tried not to be resentful, but he was doing so much work and for what? So Dumbledore could work on his tan?

But what he said was, "I could kiss you, Elphias."

Elphias turned pink and extra squeaky, and Ron ended the hug. Dumbledore had made a mess of his personal life too, and Ron wasn't interested in picking up those pieces. He already had enough on his plate with Grindelwald's screeds from Nurmengard. He'd thought that breaking up with Lavender had been tough, but that had only last a few weeks, and she hadn't been a psychopath.

Besides, what if he got Dumbledore into a better place, relationship-wise, and somehow that ended up destroying their timeline? Ron had gone through too much to risk that.

Also, when he got to Trinidad, where Dumbledore had been staying, he didn't want to hook the man up with a pleasant-smelling and decidedly not insane wizard to help him get over his last boyfriend and his completely understandable guilt and shame over his last boyfriend. It was beyond unfair to Ron that he'd been holed up in a mildewy castle while Dumbledore had been reclining on white, sandy beaches, probably drinking fruity drinks and reading silly novels. Ron could have used a beach and a drink and a book. He had books at Hogwarts, but books were different when you were lazing around in the sand instead of by a desk. There was a transfigurative power in the sun, and idleness. Ron had written a paper on that it had actually been published, and keeping up Dumbledore's academic achievements wasn't all fun and games either. Except for the part where he used the papers to insult other wizards in the field, that was fun and almost made writing the rest of the boring, stuffy papers worth it.

"I'm looking for," he began, but he didn't know if Dumbledore was using his real name. Almost certainly not, but it was Dumbledore. "Tall bloke, thin, glasses, gray hair and beard?"

The manager gave him a questioning look. "But that is you, sir."

"Right," said Ron. "We're--related. He's whimsical, likes sweets, has made a whole lot of bad life choices--"

"Ah," said the manager. "At this time of day, probably he is at the cafe." He pointed. Ron squinted into the sun, wishing he'd brought sunglasses. "They have chess sets. You are his brother?"

"Yeah," said Ron. He supposed Aberforth wouldn't mind a little identity theft.

"You are going to yell at him," the manager said. "I can tell. I have brothers too."

"Thanks," said Ron. He pondered whether to obliviate the man, but it wasn't like he was going to tell anyone anything useful, and, besides, anyone who found out there were two Dumbledores running around would think Ron was the real one. Still, Ron threw a disillusionment charm around himself as he walked down the beach. You could never be too careful. Dumbledore had run before, but maybe, Ron hoped, he'd been undisturbed long enough to have stopped taking precautions. Maybe he'd even been day drinking.

From the look of it, he had. There was this huge half-goblet, half-fishbowl and it looked like it contained--wine and fruit, Ron thought, casting back to holidays he'd taken with Hermione, when he could convince her to take holidays. Sangria. Although there was rather more ice in it than Ron remembered. Dumbledore was lounging on the bench that lined the cafe's courtyard wall, reading _Transfiguration Today_ , but next to him sat a fat murder mystery that had been on the _Prophet's_ bestseller list last year and Ron still hadn't gotten around to reading. He needed light entertainment, not memos about what happened when you let three Defense against the Dark Arts teachers in a row get tickled into insanity by the Giant Squid. It wasn't his fault, it was the curse's! And those professors', for not heeding the warnings about the squid. Honestly, it was in everyone's welcome packet and half his speeches.

Ron pulled out his wand, dropped into the lounge chair next to Dumbledore, and cleared his throat.

Dumbledore glanced up. "Expelliarmus," Ron said. Dumbledore's wand flew at him and he pocketed it. "That's better." He was trying, and failing, not to be smug. "We can have this chat without you running out on me."

"What do you want?" Dumbledore looked wary. Dumbledore looked--well, wrong. Ron supposed it was because he'd been seeing his own face as Dumbledore's for so long that the nose seemed to have been broken in the wrong places, the hair a shade too dark, the beard too short, the glasses in the shape of a full moon instead of a crescent. Or, since they were smoked glass, a new moon. This wasn't the wizard he'd seen in the mirror, but he also didn't think it was the wizard he remembered from his own schooldays. A couple of decades on holiday and a good tan would do that for you.

"Dunno," said Ron. "Maybe for you to, oh, take over your life again so I don't have to fight another dark lord for you. Recruit increasingly awful Defense against the Dark Arts teachers for you. Watch a bunch of people die, knowing I can't do anything to stop it. Be nice to Draco bloody Malfoy."

"You know," said Dumbledore, "you're not really making this sound like something I would want to do either."

Ron summoned his drink and slurped it all down. "I don't want to do it. I have to, because you won't. I've been fighting your fights for thirty-odd years and I'm tired. I miss my wife and my kids and my brothers and sister and my best friend. I miss closing up shop early and getting greasy Muggle take-away with Neville. And you are sitting on a beach in the bloody Caribbean without a care in the world--"

"I care--"

"You don't. I know, you're afraid your ex-boyfriend went on a murdering and conquering spree for you, but--"

"I made the wrong choices--"

"Things came out okay!" Ron shouted. "And that's why I have to make the same choices you did, because Voldemort," he said, and shuddered, "could win! Just one tiny thing going wrong, and he could _win_!"

Dumbledore looked at him again. "You do realize that according to that argument, you're the most qualified person to deal with--"

"No," said Ron. "Absolutely not. I didn't win any awards. I'm not clever. I've been coasting by on your reputation for years. You only made me prefect because you're mad. And I don't know half of what you do, or did. Just what Harry told me."

"Harry who?"

Ron shut his eyes, but immediately opened them again in case Dumbledore tried to sneak his wand away. "This is your fight," he said. "Your responsibility. You just going to run from that again?"

Dumbledore went a bit white beneath the tan.

"I'm at the point of letting your boyfriend out of Nurmengard and telling him where you are."

"He's not my boyfriend," snapped Dumbledore.

"Yeah, you try telling him that. He's completely lost it, mentally, but at least he _wants_ to act, and, honestly, I wouldn't even be doing it in the hopes of goading you to action, I'd be doing it because I'm at my wits' end here. I ask him one little question and he floods me with OWLs about Muggles it'd be good to kill." Ron seriously suspected the last one had just been Grindelwald copying the Moscow phonebook.

Dumbledore sighed. "Again, this isn't--"

"No," snapped Ron, "responsibilities never sound nice. No one's ever had to be told it's their destiny to booze it up or cuddle kittens."

That got him a smile from Dumbledore. 

"Look. I've got my own part to play in this war. And I do it, without complaining or running off." If Hermione was here, she'd punch him for that. But that was only once, and he'd come back, and he didn't intend to give Dumbledore any leverage. "Even if you can't send me back to my friends and family, you can make it so I don't have to stand by while my friends and family suffer."

"I," said Dumbledore, and sighed.

The problem, Ron reflected, was that the Dumbledore in his head was supposed to say something like, _I understand, let me help you,_ but the Dumbledore in real life was more of the _I understand, sucks to be you_ sort.

"I don't want to do it," said Dumbledore. "And you don't want to do it. Let's say we play for it."

And he gestured to the chess set at one of the café's small tables.

Ron's throat went dry. This was going to be easy. He was good at chess. Percy had stopped playing with him when he was seven. Most of his siblings hadn't liked losing at chess to him, except for Ginny, who played because she knew she was still better than him at Quidditch. Harry would gamely play with him, and so would Scorpius, but the only person who could give Ron a real run for his money was Rose. And, he suspected, Dumbledore was no Rose Granger-Weasley-Malfoy.

"No take backs," he said.

"None."

"No best out of threes."

"None."

"No--"

"Hello, Marcus," said Dumbledore, and Ron swiveled in his seat.

"Hello," said the man, Marcus. He was a bloke about half Ron's age, with a deep tan and highly developed muscles.

"This is my brother, Aberforth," said Dumbledore. "I believe I've told you about him?"

Marcus chewed on his lip. "Aye," he said, after a minute. Then he nodded, and went on his way.

"Rude," said Ron.

Dumbledore gave him a hint of a smile. "You don't know what I've told him about Aberforth."

Ron _liked_ Aberforth. "I beat you at chess, and you go back to Hogwarts and do your job," he said. "That's the deal."

"And if I win, you agree to continue on in my position?"

"Yeah," said Ron. But Dumbledore wasn't going to win. He was sure of that.

He was a little less sure of that five moves in. After all, Dumbledore didn't have to sit on board meetings, listen to teachers' complaints, feed and groom a needy Phoenix, cope with the Ministry. Dumbledore didn't even have to read the newspaper. He must have had plenty of time to practice playing chess in the three decades he'd been skiving off. Life, Ron reflected as Dumbledore took one of his rooks with a pawn, was just not fair.

But Ron was still good at the game. That was the last piece of Ron's that Dumbledore took in some time. Ron watched Dumbledore play, and watched Dumbledore watching him. Knowing your opponent was half the battle, and the thing was, Ron knew Dumbledore at least a little form his school days and Harry's stories and having to fake like he _was_ him for three decades. Dumbledore didn't know anything about Ron Weasley.

Still, it was a long, grueling match. Sweat dripped down into Ron's beard and itched at his armpits. His glasses were slippery. The manager brought out more cold, frothy drinks. Ron made a note to himself to give the man a tip, then demolished Dumbledore's bishop.

As the game progressed, Dumbledore got tenser and tenser. _Too bad,_ Ron wanted to say. Or, _maybe if you'd come back to do your job twenty years ago it wouldn't seem so daunting now._ But Hermione had always told him not to be a sore winner (like she was one to talk), so he bit his tongue and reserved it for a time when Dumbledore had to make a really critical move and Ron could completely unbalance him.

"You're good at this," Dumbledore murmured, as Ron took out his queen with a knight.

"Wouldn't have said yes if I wasn't." Ron thought a bit, then added, "You're not half-bad yourself."

Dumbledore snorted. "I do miss wizarding chess. My old set would have started a mutiny, oh, three moves ago."

"Yeah," said Ron with a grin. Actually, he sort of enjoyed Muggle chess. It was easier to think, without all the screaming about how you were doing it wrong, and how your opponent needed to be crushed to bits, and all that.

And then someone _did_ start screaming.

"Fuck!" Ron jumped up. There was a figure in the waves, thrashing and choking on shouts about something in the water, something--

Ron might have said Dumbledore had run away form his responsibilities, but he was definitely running towards the water now. Ron took an instant to take comfort, and maybe even pride, in the Dumbledore he'd known as a kid, before hitching up his suit trousers and running after.

(He also took the moment to slide his queen back to safety. He didn't want to sacrifice her if he didn't have to, and, hell, it wasn't like Dumbledore had played fair these last few decades.)

"Oi!" he shouted as he drew even with Dumbledore, and tossed him his wand. Ron didn't know what was in that water--he had hazy memories of Muggle films about sharks, but it could also be territorial mermen or another giant squid. He'd had really bad luck with cephalopods lately, it wouldn't have surprised him if it had followed him here--

Dumbledore looked shocked, but he caught the wand, and they kept on running until they were almost at the waves. The man was flailing and screaming and Dumbledore looked over at Ron, his face grim. "How good are your memory charms?"

"Hogwarts is a death trap and the board of governors is even worse," said Ron. "I've had plenty of practice."

"Good," said Dumbledore, shaking out his sleeves. "We may need to wipe some Muggle memories."

Oh, wonderful. At least the Ministry thought the sun shone out of Dumbledore's arse. It was a lot more pleasant than when the entire Ministry had thought Ron Weasley _was_ an arse for forgetting his wife's birthday. That had not been a pleasant month for anyone, but especially Ron. He'd been stopped in Diagon Alley so many times, but it wasn't his fault if Hermione took her frustrations out at work. If that lot hadn't kept her so busy, she'd have conjured up a swarm of birds to remind him.

Ron took a deep breath, pointed his wand at the bloke in the sea, and yelled, _"Accio!"_

It didn't work too well at first--there was resistance, drag. Ron looked over at Dumbledore, who looked rather serene as he prepared himself to combat whatever was holding the bloke in the surf back. It was reassuring, Ron though. It was the determined face of a wizard who could take on a dark lord and win.

Finally the man stumbled out of the waves, helped along by Ron's spell, and fell facedown on the beach. It was the bloke who'd stopped by their table earlier, Dumbledore's friend. Ron knelt down to see if he'd passed out.

"Sorry," he gasped, as Ron poked at his shoulder. "I was out--and there was something big and white--"

"Jaws," said Ron knowingly.

"Skates." The man did a full-body shudder in the sand.

Dumbledore tsked. "You had us worried, Marcus," he said gently, and helped him up. "Let's get you back to the hotel. I think you could use a drink or two."

Skates, Ron thought, as he helped Dumbledore bear Marcus back to the hotel. They each got an arm and Marcus limped between them--he'd apparently twisted an ankle in his rush to get out of the water. There were red marks on his legs, but it could have been rocks, or seaweed. Ron was trying not to imagine Marcus getting attacked by giant underwater versions of Hugo's footwear from his ice dancing days, because then he'd start laughing, but it was hard.

They got Marcus ensconced in the hotel bar with a glass of rum.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm--" The glass knocked against the rim of his teeth. "Terribly sorry, but. Terribly grateful."

Dumbledore patted him on the shoulder, and Marcus's hand rose up to hold it for a second. "Dear fellow, don't mention it."

Ron decided not to mention that a certain badly-styled dark wizard would be incredibly jealous if he knew of Marcus's existence. He was feeling rather fond of Dumbledore, and hoping that that small bout of heroics might have reminded Dumbledore of what he once was, what he still could be, what he ought to be. "Skates a big problem here, then?" he asked as they walked back. He'd drawn his wand when they left the bar. Ron remembered what Dumbledore had done at their last confrontation, and he wasn't feeling _that_ charitable. 

"They're not dangerous," said Dumbledore. "But they can be very big and very curious."

"Like Grawp," said Ron, and sniggered. Dumbledore didn't get the joke, but in about twenty years he would.

They settled back down at the chessboard. "Whose turn was it?" Dumbledore asked, looking at the pieces with a small frown.

Ron felt a flash of guilt over his shifted queen, and suppressed a grimace. "Yours, I think."

Dumbledore looked down at the board for a long time, then reached out for his drink. It was a very large and very full glass, and Dumbledore took a very large and very long gulp. Ron almost felt bad about moving his queen when Dumbledore was distracted, but then he remembered he'd been doing Dumbledore's _job_ for thirty years. Dumbledore _owed_ him.

Dumbledore picked up his remaining knight and said, quietly, "Checkmate."

Ron stared down at the board in horror. It was. But that wasn't how--he could have sworn that wasn't how the pieces were set up when he'd left to follow Dumbledore down to the beach. Had his sleeve dragged Dumbledore's knight a few squares closer to his king? Moving the queen hadn't left anything vulnerable, so--

He looked back at Dumbledore, who was the very picture of innocence, and Ron had seen that face, had made that face, often enough to know what it meant. It felt like every sea monster he'd feared might be attacking Marcus had come for him, and, coiled in the grip of the Giant Squid's tentacles, he could not breathe.

"I'm sorry," said Dumbledore, like that was enough. Like that could ever be enough.


End file.
